 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Daniel Oyelo. I'm the program coordinator at the Berkman Client Center and we're so excited to have you guys here this evening with us. We have an amazing panel discussion on its way, so just hold tight for a couple of seconds while I go through a couple brief remarks and reminders. This reminder that this lecture is being video recorded and maybe broadcast, so if you choose to participate in the discussion, you're presumed to consent to use of your comments and your image of these recordings, so just be aware. Tomorrow the Berkman Client Center is hosting an event, the Transparency and Freedom of Information in the Middle Age and it's right above us upstairs in this building room 2-0-1-2, as well as in Milstein East Beach, so feel free to check it out. For more information, you can go on our website. And now to our two moderators of this event. We have Eric Gordon, who's the founding director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson. He is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Client Center for Internet and Society here at the Law School. He studies civic media and public engagement within the U.S. and the developing world and he's specifically interested in the application of games and play in these contexts. So in addition to being a researcher, he's also a designer of award-winning engagement games, which are games that facilitate civic participation. On my right, I have Paul Mihalidis. His research explores the nexus of media literacy, young people, and engagement in civic life. He is the director of the Salisbury Academy on Media and Global Change, a program that annually gathers scholars and students from around the world to investigate media and global citizenship. So without further ado, I'd like to take the floor from here. Great. I think this is... Should I use that or...? No, you got it. All right, great. Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. It's great to see all of you here and it's also great to see all the young people in the room. I just want to acknowledge how awesome it is that you are here and we really welcome you and your presence. So I also want to thank the Berkman Client Center for hosting this event. It's exciting for me. My name is Eric Gordon, as you just heard. I'm a faculty associate here at the Berkman Client Center and a faculty member at Emerson College. And then Paul Mihalidis is the co-director of the Engagement Lab with me over at Emerson College and a professor at Emerson College as well. And my co-editor of this book, Civic Media Technology, Design and Practice, which is why we're here. So I'm going to introduce a panel in a second. These esteemed people are sitting here for a reason and I'll get to them in a second. I want to say a few things. Paul and I edited this book together. It's called Civic Media Technology, Design and Practice. It was published in June by MIT Press and as these things go, we are here in November celebrating its release with this event. We have brought together my favorite authors in the book right here to have a conversation about why it all matters. And trust me, I never say that to other... So joining us is Peter Levine. They're not in the... Well, actually, let me go in order. We actually have Cesar McDowell over here as a professor of practice of community development at MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. His chapter along with co-author Melissa Yvonne Chinchilla is called Partnering with Communities and Institutions in the book. Peter Levine is an associate dean for research at the Tisch College of Civic Life and the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University. And he has the first chapter in the book entitled Democracy in the Digital Age. We have Beth Coleman, who is a professor of experimental digital media and director of the City as Platform Lab at University of Waterloo. Her chapter is entitled Let's Get Lost, Poetic City Meets Data City. Colin Rhynesmith is assistant professor of library and information science at Simmons College. His chapter is called Community Media Infrastructure as Civic Engagement. And then finally, Ethan Zuckerman is the director of the Center for Civic Media and associate professor of the practice at the MIT Media Lab. And of course, longtime Berkman affiliate. He has the second chapter in the book entitled Effective Civics. And we'll talk about what that means. This book includes 42 chapters of similarly awesome people. And while these folks up here are my favorites, they are my favorites, I have to say that the real pleasure in editing a book of this size is having the opportunity to connect so many extraordinary dots. Our format this afternoon will be simple, I think. In lieu of prepared remarks, we're going to have a round table discussion that focuses less on the dots and more on the connections between them. So for those of you paying attention to the news, the United States held an election last week. The outcomes of that election were by all accounts devastating. A man that represents individualism, isolationism, xenophobia and hatred was given arguably the most powerful job in the world. With that job, he has been given a mandate, along with a unified government to dismantle the progressive social policies of the last eight years. When we ask ourselves how this could have happened, which I have done for nearly every waking moment over the last week, sadly extended by my election-induced insomnia, we have to look at the media, the 24-hour news cycle, the social networks, the languishing newspapers, and all of their corresponding algorithmic entanglements. The media in this formulation is the message. They represent the conditions through which people confront and create the world they live in. Content doesn't determine meaning. As Marshall McLuhan said, content is like a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. Never in want of colorful language. I'm trying not to get distracted right now. In putting together this book, Paul and I were not concerned about the content of civics, but rather all the things that enable civic action taking. Or, as we say in the introduction, the technologies, designs, and practices that produce and reproduce the sense of being in the world with others toward common good. We go on to qualify that statement as referring to the good of the commons, or actions taken that benefit a public outside of the actor's intimate sphere. And then we say that civic media are any mediated practice that enables a community to imagine themselves as being connected, not through achieving, but through striving for common good. Each of the authors in this book seeks to shed light on that striving for common good, mobilizing, advocating, empowering, teaching, through the intentional use, invention, or appropriation of media. We are not referring to a generalizable public good, but as determined by a group of people acting together. I'm sorry, but good as determined by a group of people acting together. So as editors of this book, we contend that this phenomenon is significant enough for it to warrant its own label. We are not just talking about the media that happens to be civic, or civics that happens to be mediated. We are talking about civic media as a unique and emergent set of practices that need to be understood and articulated on their own terms. I think our book succeeds in providing a critical framework for the newness of these practices. Civic media is not good because it is new, and it's not new because it's good. It is a set of practices that emerges in response to a changing culture, including the rapid diminishing of trust in traditional civic institutions. And it reflects the response from institutions in the form of civic tech, big data, smart cities that are being taken to bolster their personal effectiveness and relevance. It is here that they collide. As I explained in my chapter written with Stephen Walter, a clash between that insatiable striving for technological efficiency so common in big institutions and that equally impassioned desire for human connection, justice, and social change that has emerged in everyday civic life. But we find ourselves at a crossroads. At this moment in time, looking around the world and back on history for the last several years, if civic media practices have not been effective, then we have a problem. And perhaps we have been wasting our time. If civic media practices have been effective and we still wound up here, then we are part of the problem and we have to question the use of our time. So with that, bright note, I want to open it up to our panel. And I want to also, before I do that, I want to say that I imagine this event to be very different last week than I do now. And I want to, and that I think is reflected, I'm sure it will be reflected in what our panel has to say and what you have to say. But if that's the frame of civic media, I want us to question that. And I would, what I want to ask to the panel and I want you to, you can jump in as you wish. Would you all be able to provide some insight into what matters now? What is the persistent value of understanding, inventing, and using civic media? And what are the dangers that we should be aware of? So if anybody wants to take that broad question, please jump in. Do you raise your hand at a round table? Can anybody hear me? Okay, excellent. So Banksy, the street artist, the British street artist, who's famous for his provocative images, but also famous for being anonymous, choosing not to reveal his identity. He was tracked using tools that have been developed to find terrorists. So a group of data scientists use the same tools to track and unveil Banksy. And it's not tragic. Banksy actually is a very strange figure in terms of art and art world and commodities and how those things circulate. And it's kind of playful, but it's also a small anecdote in a relationship to the bigger texture of how we're living in terms of exposure and the tools that are available and the ways in which we might not even understand that we are tracked and trackable. So the big data set that I've been interested in recently is how public Black Lives Matter is in terms of super granular. We can see who people are. You can trace things easily through the retweets. I can do that with my eye. So what can other groups do in terms of saying we're going to actually put power and time behind finding not just the people who choose to speak to the media, who choose to become public figures, but the people who are kind of core to organizing, but perhaps do not want their privacy invaded? So the question of publicness has really been pushed forward. And Trump on the horizon or the instance of Trump makes it even more pressing in terms of thinking about how do we understand exposure, even as we claim the right to public space, the right to the city and the right to make our interests clear and defend our interests. So I think like a lot of people last week, I spent a lot of time comforting people. I had a lot of people show up in my office really wanting to talk through things. I expected to be wiping up some tears. I didn't expect to be wiping them off the face as a fellow faculty. Where I was trying to go after I think helping people try to see some light spots and all of this. And by the way, the quick light spot version of this goes, if you'd had one out of 100 Trump voters vote for Clinton, tiny amount, we would be talking about a historic moment with our first female president and we would be completely ignoring all the hateful, racist, xenophobic, misogynist bullshit that's been brought up by all of this. And so the good news is that we have no excuse to ignore and we actually get to work on it. Where I wanted to get my students and where I'm going to try to get them in the lab meeting tomorrow is to say, this is fascinating. This election was crazy. And a whole bunch of stuff happened that's never happened before. And it's really interesting because it's right at this intersection between media and civic action. You had our classically neutral, just the facts press completely stepped down from that and say, you know what, we're getting into the fray, we're rolling up. Everybody endorsing one candidate editorial pages coming out and essentially saying the other candidate is a threat to our very existence. And it didn't matter. And in fact, if anything, it probably made it worse. So one piece of theory, two pieces of research, piece of theory. Chris Hayes published a couple of years ago called Twilight of the elites. He basically says, forget left right, it's not all that helpful anymore. Think institutionalist insurrectionists. Institutionalists are people who believe that the basic institutions of society are all right. They need a little strengthening, we might need to dust them off. Insurrectionists say, you got to be kidding me. Knock these down, put something else in their place, they're driving us in the wrong direction. This was an this was an insurrectionist election. And so every time the press stood up and said, what Donald Trump is doing is unprecedented. He's crossed a line that no one would would cross before. Many people who were insurrectionists looked at that and said, wow, that guy's for real. He's not going to be another one of these bullshit candidates who comes in and says, I'm looking for change and then does nothing. This guy is genuinely crazy. When he says he's going to drive the bus off the cliff, he may actually drive the bus off the cliff. So two pieces of research on this, we're doing some work with Yochai Benkler around this platform we have called Media Cloud that has been gathering every story in English language media about the election for the last 18 months. And we've done some preliminary graphs for a couple months before actually going to publish this. But the preliminary graphs are fastened, they cluster into two clusters. Now, you were all guessing that what you're not guessing is what's in the clusters. In one of the clusters is, you know, the New York Times, the Nation, Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, Reason Magazine, anything you can think of as far as mainstream media on the left and on the right. That's one cluster. There's another cluster. It's got Breitbart and it's got 4,000 things around it you've never heard of. So we actually watched the birth of a new media sphere, and we watched it be enormously influential in all of this. Here's another piece of research. This one is actually helpful. We've looked at the death of every unarmed person of color at the hands of the police in the US from 2013 to 2016 to look for media attention to them. Generally speaking, prior to the death of Michael Brown, the average person of color unarmed killed by the police got zero stories about them. After Mike Brown, you see a radical shift. On average, you see 10 times as many stories. On average, you see 100 times as many Facebook shares. The peak in that curve of attention is where Black Lives Matter starts coming to public attention. Black Lives Matter has had an enormous amount to do with attention to the death of people of color at the hands of the police because someone figured out how to put a name on it. But that attention doesn't last. It lasted for about two and a half years. We're now back down to rates that we were at before. So what we are discovering, I really do have a point here. I am going to shut up at some point. People are learning how to use media for their agendas. They're learning how to create new media ecosystems that supports their paranoid fact-free point of view. They're also learning to use media to name and call attention to phenomena that have been around for a long time and have not been worthy of the public attention worthies and quotes there like the death of unarmed people of color. We don't know how this stuff works yet, but we damn well better figure it out because it's become one of the most powerful forces in civic life. Just a brief thought, and I'm not committed to this, but I'm not sure this is right, but one view would be Black Lives Matter shows that social movements using media can change some agendas within, they can change what people talk about. But the election shows that media really doesn't matter much at all. So I mean, one view of the election, despite your fascinating clouds, one view of the election is that we have an institutional structure in which it's going to produce a D and an R with very close to 50% of the vote when election time comes, and we have an institutional structure that allows the Ds and the Rs to pick their winner based on a very small minority of the population. And that's a bug in the system that was there all along. But what the election showed was that amazing innovations for good and evil in the media structure and tremendously unequal ability to use it in different kinds of ways made no difference. We got exactly the numbers we would have expected 18 months ago, which I think would be a little bit of a caution. I have mixed feelings about whether that's true, but it would be a bit of a caution to what you said at the beginning, which is what happened was a failure of media and we need to figure it out. You could say what happened was a failure of the constitutional structure. Media had, what it proved was that media didn't matter one bit. Peter, do you think that's true on turnout as well? Do you think that's also as anticipated? Yes, I mean, yes, I mean, we focus, we focus specifically on youth turnout youth turnout was exactly what it was in 2012 and just a touchdown from 2008. But I think the best estimate for the national turnout was it was right there. Also, relentless patterns of the same basically the same people voting. I mean, there are some subtleties. So so if you if you're focused on why did the breakdown happen as it happened and particularly in the Electoral College, then of course you can find interesting patterns about certain demographic groups voting more and less. But overall the maze I mean, the graph I just showed yesterday in a presentation, the graph of the youth turnout since 1972 broken down by demographic groups. That's a bunch of flat lines with little waves, right? But it's basically a bunch of flat lines since 1972 when the demographics of the country have changed, the political agendas have changed, the nature of politics has changed and the media systems changed. And we have voter turnout for non college youth for college youth for African Americans for whites, all kind of parallel lines. But what about the the people who weren't counted by the pollsters? I mean, how big a numbers that in terms of the difference of white, rural people who came out to vote who hadn't voted in a long time? You mean because the polls were were missing the missing the prediction or or just didn't didn't reach them didn't ask them didn't talk to them. They weren't counted as voters. Well, so the polls were were really accurate. The poll that you know the national aggregate of all those 360 literally 360 different polling companies had had Hillary up by three and a half points before the election she won by about one and a half or two points, right? I mean, the only the only failure is in a few Midwestern states where they really do seem to have gotten the model wrong. And I agree actually that would be a good description of what happened with their modeling of Wisconsin if they didn't. But although Michigan's got the same story as Wisconsin in terms of turnout. Anyway, I don't mean to be I'm first of all not even a political scientist, but all I'm doing is is putting a theoretical perspective that's kind of contrary to what you both said in different in different ways. But I think it's interesting to even to bring this back to so I just an hour before here I was on the both the Washington Post journalist asking about this the proliferation of fake news and what and then how does citizens how could so many citizens get it wrong and their presumption was the New York Times, the Washington Post facts they're all being ignored. And there's nothing going back to what you're saying this the emergence of this alternative space that and the question they were asking was were the the people who are sharing fake or advocating for value driven pieces whether they were credible or not were those were those citizens aware of what they were doing were they aware that the information credibility had been shifting and so I think you know going back to this notion of you know you can write about civic efficacy we have persistent this could the media could not matter but what did within that media use we did see a fairly large shift into another it completely new and emerging form of of people using media in innovative ways siloed perhaps polarized perhaps and I didn't know I was quite lost in how I would answer this journalist question about what role can why are citizens using media this way and why are they why are they ignoring all the facts advocate for this and I wonder if anyone has any insight into that I mean this is something quite the only thing that comes up for me in this is I really appreciate it you know the what you can say about how these two clouds are emerging and the one on the right which is the new one emerging is actually doesn't tell us much about anything about what is to be which I think is a real opportunity as we're speaking to and so I I'm not sure how much we learn by really looking at this because all this is kind of nascent and developing and what that suggests for me is that is actually a great opportunity for us if we start thinking about some fundamental principles to structure some different opportunities so for those of you who may or may not have ever heard me speak to you know I always always like to use this quote by this guy named Carl Moore about what democracy is right as he uses it to describe community I had jacket to use to talk about democracy and he basically says democracy exists and I think this is important to say exist because that was just we haven't gotten there yet when a group of people who are interdependent struggle with the traditions that bind them and the interests that separate them so they can realize a future that's an improvement on the past and what I like about that is that the whole work is about the struggle around the traditions and the interest and what I think the media has to answer what we have to answer in the civic media is how well are we creating the containers in the spaces in which that peaceful struggle can happen right but that's where we are at the space and we don't have a lot of those we don't have them in the analog world and we certainly don't have them a lot in the digital world right because by nature what's happening is the fragmentation that's happening in the sense that particularly in our in our kind of electronic media what folks can do is you know we we self-select we want to be in relationship with right and we can't maintain a healthy democracy that way right because then we we are in the space that really what matters most is who wins right and if it's all that is what's matters then you don't actually have a society that functions well because somebody else is always trying to fight the other person you know it's a zero-sum game and we the premise of democracy is you can actually do better so our strut our struggle right now is that we actually don't have an infrastructure in place for a different kind of civic life right it doesn't exist we don't have its containers for those struggles we don't have the process for it and what I think the new space over there is doing is actually people trying to construct something on their own right and little things are coming in emerging and I think it is right I think it's the institutions are aren't functioning what and people are insurgents and they're finding new ways to do it but I don't think as strictly insurgent strategy will also get us there right that we need something much more I don't want to say plan for because I'm in a school of planning I don't mean it that way but something more and not even thought those right workers people are thinking deeply about what you're doing but we need something more holistic I guess that's what I'm looking for well I have to jump in I'm going to take an institutionalized perspective because I'm not a media and communication scholar I'm actually a library and information science professor preparing future generations or the the future of librarians in this field and I would actually argue that well let me step back for a second actually join what Ethan was saying in terms I've also been you know trying to comfort students and colleagues in this space and I think we've begun to have some really interesting conversations with my students who are getting ready to move into public spaces just let that sit for a second right public spaces for the next four years and how can we embrace those spaces in the way that we were just saying Caesar and I think that this to me gives me great hope because for a few things a few reasons one public libraries for a very long time have always recognized they need to reflect their communities and that's common with some serious consequences because for example we know that you know the internet for example has had incredible impacts in the field of journalism and other sort of fields public libraries are going through that transformation right now public libraries are being asked to be different types of spaces that they've never been before but I'm actually very excited and hopeful about this I think this is really wonderful but there are core values principles that we know that librarians in particular in public libraries cherish and actually fight pretty hard for in terms of intellectual freedom privacy there are fundamental values and principles connected to our very essence of what it means to live in a democracy and that gives me great hope to end that I can work with my students and prepare them no matter where they go out into the country that there are opportunities to help create those public spaces for public discourse for public dialogue for and also for things like digital and media literacy training and engagement with new technologies in ways that can bring people together in spaces and I think for me that gives me great hope at least I'm trying to be hopeful because I know for my students I have to be hopeful. I have a question about about institutions and insurrectionists let's say I spent a lot of time talking to people within institutions who are wondering precisely how they should transform appropriately. So that is city governments or NGOs, newspapers even who are coming from an institutional perspective, libraries coming from an institutional perspective understand that people demand other things from them that they are no longer relevant unless they are able to open up and to be responsive in a way that they haven't before. I guess my question is this idea of responsive institutions is something that we've heard a lot about. We've heard a lot about transparent institutions and I wonder from your perspective is that is that professionalization of engagement, the professionalization of transparency, is that something that we should be concerned about? Is that something that you know as the insurrectionists sort of take over and we see that people are getting their information from outside of these institutions and then institutions are trying to essentially move in that way, transform themselves to be non institutional. How should we respond? What are good responses to that kind of trend? I actually love that. It reminds me of back in the late 60s during the shift to kind of community mental health, there was a clinician by the name of Thomas Dwyer who wrote this piece on it and he called it the professionalization of the client and his whole notion is that you can't have professions without having clients. And if you have clients, people in client positions, particularly around things that they need as part of being part of the public and you are in some sense disempowering them. And so raises a really good question about to what things do we really want to professionalize in which things don't we want to? Because, yeah, it's some of it is transparent to whom? Yeah, because things that look obvious to us and are very Berkman discourse around transparency. And I'm I'm Berkman. I'm a fan. I'm part of it. But it's one pool of thinking about Internet freedom. Information needs to be free, things need to be transparent. And on first blush, that seems correct in every case. But we already have cases where well, so for example, this, I couldn't think of a more benign case, but when a data scientist called for freedom of information around medallion taxi data in New York City. Taxi data. Wow, great. We're going to learn all kinds of things about how the city, excuse me, how the city moves. And we can see class, we can see different ethnic groups, just by looking at where people get picked up and how often at what time of night. But so now it's public, and people start digging into it. And you also get to find out, did Hugh Jackman, that's Wolverine, like, did he sleep at home? Because if you triangulate between what you can do if you scrub through the data, and then you also on social media get a picture of Hugh Jackman at a certain time and place, you can figure out, oh, he didn't sleep at home last night. So it's taxi data. It's just like, oh, gosh, civic data or making things civic, making them public. It always seems like where many of us have started this premise that this is a good, it's just a good, we need to understand then how to work with it. So now that we're moving into some time then with understanding how to work with that we see, well there's exposure, there are things that are going to come up that we didn't know about. And the good side of that, the silver lining is we know something more about at least how publicly we're living in all different circumstances. It's not just what we post to Facebook, it's also in sensor network in impacted cities. I mean, people who live in London, they know this for a long time that you're always on video, but having more awareness in terms of, well, so now if we know this, what happens next? Beth, there was an even worse story that came out of that New York City taxi data. One of the studies that came out looked at one of the adult entertainment clubs in somewhere in 10th Avenue in Manhattan. And it turns out that if you're leaving a stirp club at three in the morning, you're either a customer or you work there and perhaps you dance there. And so if you can find a regular taxi linkage between this block on 10th Avenue and this block in Queens or this block in Brooklyn, what you've basically done is developed a tool to stalk the people who work there, which turns out to be an application that you can imagine people coming up with. So these are the sort of unexpected things that have come out of civic data. As it happens, I was in London yesterday at an event called Open Up, sponsored by the Omidyar Foundation, which is is sort of one of the leading funders of open government. And it was meant to be something of a question where we sort of asked ourselves, where are we as far as the open data movement? Is this really getting us where we want to be? And I gave the schtick you just heard me give about insurrectionism and Trump's an insurrectionist and it's all going there. And the next panel got up and someone from the open government partnership got up and said, well, the most insurrectionist thing you can do is to take this demand for information and lead to open government coming out from governments. And I just put my head down on the table and I was like, you know, this is going to take a while to get across. Most institutions don't need to be looking at this question of whether they open a little bit more data or a lot more data. They need to be asking two questions, right? The first one is, assume you don't exist anymore. And the private sector takes over what you were doing. How would the private sector do it? And then the next question you want to ask is, assume you don't exist anymore, the private sector is never going to take on what you're doing because there's no fricking way to do it. Is there a way that as community activists, you can imagine people getting together and doing it. My friend Molly Souter has been urging people to look back at the example of the Black Panthers who independently of the advocacy work that they were doing, the norm-shaping work that they were doing, did incredible work creating community services and underserved communities and used that as a way to sort of anchor their work. Insurrectionism is the disruption that the venture capitalists love to talk to, turned up to 11. And so looking at existing institutions and not sort of saying, hey, maybe we should open our data. But looking at this and basically saying, okay, we burned down. What does someone build new in our place? I think that's actually the sort of shift that people need to be thinking about, whether that's a deeply neoliberal let the market do it or whether it's a deeply communitarian shift, that's how to start thinking within that mindset. On this privacy question starting when Beth spoke at the first time, I was thinking, seems like what we want is the government not to be able to see us completely because we need to have privacy, but us feel to see the government very well. But I'm starting to wonder if that's actually not, if being able to see the government too well might not be so great either. First of all, the government is a lot of different forms. So it's probably better if the federal government can't see LA's understanding of its own, of the undocumented kids in its own schools. Then there's a lot of people working, going to be working in the federal government. It might be better if nobody can see what they're doing, because some of them should be doing things that the president wouldn't like. So actually wonder if privacy extends into the, if the need for privacy actually extends into the institutions, at least it's worth thinking about. Right. So I think, so I want to give a chance for everyone to ask questions here. I guess one question for me leading into us hearing from you, your question is so we've just bring this back into civic media. There's a few of you here written about communities getting lost, community media infrastructure, community engagement. I wonder, even from what Ethan just said, how do we think about, how do we think about what we will do with communities? Or is there a role for civic media in communities and what does that look like on the heels of what just happened? Where we can see the most impact coming in terms of how we work with, how communities are worked with to respond to some of these over arching or the emerging results of what happened and the consequences that people are feeling. And I'm wondering if we think that or what role we see civic media having there? It's a question that we struggle with a lot and we continue to struggle even after printing this book. It's really good to buy, but the changes, we advocated for this thing called common good. And I think last week we really kind of got back to how does that, what does that look like? And those of us doing work in communities through formal and formal schooling, how do we see that happening now? So I think one of the challenges that came up here, and I took it a little bit from what Colin put forward, is this question of what are our spaces for community discourse these days? So I'm pretty active on Twitter, I've got a pretty good follower base. I think as you may be able to tell, I'm pretty pissed off and I've been tweeting some fairly angry and some fairly bold stuff lately. I have gotten a whole lot of new followers and they don't like me very much. And I believe someone recently referred to something that I tweeted as perfect example that sustained liberalism causes permanent brain damage. And so the interesting thing about Twitter, right, is that Twitter's not Facebook. It doesn't have to be mutual. I really like Colin and I think he still likes me. And so we can decide to be friends and we're going to follow each other and that's great. But what that basically means is you're going to end up with a lot of people who like you, who feel safe with you and you're going to end up with echo chambers, you're going to end up with filter bubbles. We've all gone through that. What Twitter does is essentially says this can be asymmetric. I really love Peter Levine's work. He doesn't even know who I am. So I follow Peter. I pay a lot of attention to him. I read what he has to say. He doesn't have to follow me back. The trick with all of this is that this is also what makes trolling possible because someone doesn't have to have anything in common with you. They can just think that you're a complete dipshit and go out and connect with you and just yell at you all the time. And so very quickly, like the immediate response to this is to say, anyone who's screaming at me, I'm just going to block him. And I'm trying really hard not to do this because I'm trying really, really hard to sort of respect the possibility of this medium that it's good for me on some level to see something that I saw as an obvious good. I saw Rahm Emanuel standing up and saying Chicago will be a sanctuary city and we are not going to allow people to be deported. I saw that as an unambiguous. I didn't even think about it before tweeting it out. And then I got a wave of people coming back to me and saying, I can't believe that you are advocating for ignoring federal law. All people are talking about is actually obeying the law. Clearly, liberalism causes permanent brain damage. And so somewhere you'd hope that we could actually have a conversation where liberalism causes brain damage and, oh, this is cool. Something to feel good about in Chicago could get together. The problem is I'm not actually prepared to have that conversation. Hey, I don't know enough about sanctuary cities. I thought it was cool and I shared it because it's a nice way to be a participatory progressive and because I felt like maybe it would help me be effective. Hey, I can show the voice. I can show the good things that are happening. But I don't know what I'm talking about. And I suspect my critic doesn't either. So how do we get to that deliverance? What about Rom-Emanuel's complicated relationship to the city of Chicago and the imprisonment of lots of young black people? One of a massive civic data project is going in Chicago right now because they're so desperate to figure out how to staunch the violence that they it's fairly lawless. They're like, OK, how can we make this happen? How can we pick up information? How can we use it predictively? And one of the most complicated things we've seen is prediction around crime. If we're predicting things around traffic and if you need to add more subway cars or buses, it's complex. But it's solvable. But things around people's behavior and histories of why violence emerges and is sustained or not. Like, we know that it's complicated. So I mean, Rom-Emanuel's got a lot of stuff to deal with there. And I'm glad that, OK, I don't know what sanctuary city will mean legally. And wow, it could get very complicated. I mean, I understand what you're saying. But I also feel like we're speaking as if it's before and after the deluge. And I really feel certain that for many communities in this country and in different places, it was a delusional ready. So the opportunity to have hard conversations about community, it's also super uneven in terms of how those conversations happen. The Black Panther Party was destroyed from the inside out largely because of the US government's and infiltration. And also the assumptions about the danger of having this group of people self-organize and arm and make lunch for kids and teach math. So we've seen this failure many times. It just seems maybe now more groups of people feel like, oh, wait, this is actually going to get really fucked up for me. Sorry, kids. I think you've heard that. No, you're really. I mean, I just want to really want to connect with Beth on this. I mean, old enough to remember when the 68 convention happened in Chicago and Sturley Carmichael's straight little quote saying, you know, white people used to think all this oppression was in black people's mind. Now they understand it's on their head because they've experienced it themselves. And, you know, the notion of that because something rises to the popular level and you address it at that level, right, doesn't mean you're dealing with the systemic issue that many communities are living with. And you have to do it that way. And, you know, it's the thing that Twitter, you know, even I think it's really interesting about that, you know, it's not an echo chamber, right? I mean, in some sense, you get this asynchronous communication going on. But one of the problems I have with it in kind of watching and even for myself but other people's stuff is the violence that it creates particularly around people who live with trauma and other kinds of things. And it's just like, yeah, it's no holds bar, you know, and it's like, that's not good. And there's, I don't know if we can. So I don't know, let me put it in a way, I do think it takes people who are purposely designing media and experience inside of media that forges different kinds of relationships and connections what's needed. I'm really skeptical of medias that actually of much work is out there because it hasn't been designed for that purpose, right? Yeah. That's and so it's not going to get us there. You know, we can think about how we like to use it. We have individual stories about how we do it. But ostensibly, it's designed with this framework of like, well, if I can just hit most people, you know, it doesn't do this thing. You know, we always talk about this kind of design for the margins. Like, you know, look at what's most broken in the society. Yeah. Design the communication to fix that. Right. Then you'll get something richer coming out. But right now that's. And so I think these tools that we have out there are are far won't get us where we need to go. So so one way I'm sorry. So so one way to look at that would be to say. We know that the bias. So first of all, right, all technology is political, not in the sense of right, but in the sense that when we create any system that has affordances that are baked into it makes things easier or harder. Twitter and Facebook both want to be used by a billion people. You have certain affordances that you want to bake into that, right? I'm interested in what's the conversation at MIT. The problem that I'm having over at MIT right now is there's such performance of sadness from the left that anyone who's shown up on the right is like, whoa, I don't want anything to do with this. And I've had a few brave folks sort of stand up and say, don't assume that everyone is on the same side of this. But right now the communicative structures that we're creating are pretty one-sided. Very one-sided. If we worked on creating media within a university around the idea of could we actually have a real conversation about what happened or a real conversation which I would prefer about the deeper structural issues that have come up through the selection, whether they're around xenophobia, whether they're around misogyny, whether they're around race, we've got a couple of advantages that Twitter and Facebook don't have. We don't have to make money. We just make this as a tool for our students. We also have the advantage that we have a community with something in common, which is that notion of the common campus and the common space. So, I mean, that to me feels like one thing we could challenge and try. Now, whether that's around a university, whether that's around community organizing, but that's where I really want to hear from Colin on this because libraries have this long tradition of trying to be this space. I'm curious whether they are as we're in this digital moment. So, well, thank you for the question. And it's a great question, and it's hugely important. I think, and also responding to Paul's original question, I mean, I think that when we talk about community, we have to be really clear what we mean by community. And I think that talking about spaces like MIT, what is our sample? If we're a researcher, if we're a community member, what is our community that we feel a part of? Definitions of community. And I'm very interested in physical spaces, community in the sense of small scale communities. And that's why I study public libraries and how they can work in this space. So, I think my point here, what I want to get across is I'm not sure that the same people, those people who react or act a certain way on Twitter would act the same way or communicate in the same way if they were face-to-face in their communities with people they grew up with, with people they go to church with, with people they, you know, I don't know what. And I think that's hugely important to remember. And I also then think the point here being that we then need to think about how we engage. If we are representative of some kind of an institution, what I spend a lot of time is working with my students to say, how do we do community engagement? How do we begin by listening? How do we, you know, look at the assets that exist in our community? I'm very much informed. My work is informed by asset-based community development and a lot of the great work that's been happening at MIT over the years. And so, I think that these are steps forward, both the theoretical frameworks as scholars, but also as practitioners. We can say, are we listening enough? And libraries aren't actually doing that enough. And so, I think there's a huge potential for both, particularly our public institutions, whether that's government, whether it's public libraries, but also other types of entities and groups to take a long, hard look at how they're engaging and listening in the way that they're doing that. And so, I'm excited about that again and hopeful that we can move that forward in productive ways. I think you're really right that we have been able to maintain some degree of civility face to face. But one of the creepy, creeping factors that Ethan and other people have touched on is, we have back channels showing up all over the place. So one of the places that I've looked at it, because it's particular to college campuses, is Yik Yak. So you have a texting message system, but it's temporal, it disappears, and it's also geolocative. So it's only for Harvard or it's only for Tufts. And then I can post whatever I want and I don't sign my name to it and you get to see it, you're just like, I look like what? So you have this noise around you that's the trolliest. No, they've been very generous. They think you look terrific. My favorite was Dave Chappelle saying, congratulations, America. You've elected an internet troll president. I was like, oh, okay. Well, he just slammed it. But I find it terrifying that you can be standing there and we can talk, we can try to talk. But around me, there's this swarm of... And the other question that I ask, I'm just like, these are this set of people, the demographic, they're 18 to 21. And they tell these stories. I'm just like, have you been watching Django? Like how do they even know these old, old tropes of misogyny and racism and all the rest? And is that the only configuration of whiteness that they are able to articulate? So all of that is deeply... I mean, that's content. I'm just wondering where did I get this content from? Like do they... They don't know these stories. They did not live these stories. So that... A plurality of white millennials voted for Trump, 48 to 45. Well, but I think that that was like, it could also be Bernie, bros. They're just like, let's change this. Yeah. We know this public and private space coming together. Yeah. And what is possible if we're trying to be transparent in public spaces, yet there are tools that allow us to take private acts that are completely in the face of potentially, maybe we feel like we're making gains because we're all in the same room, yet we're pulling out our phones and turning around and doing that. I mean, that sounds like a very real issue and problem. I've been following the Yic Yac channel in this room and it seems like everybody wants to chime in. Yeah. So... So, let's turn to you guys now. If anybody wants to ask a question of the panel. Getting back to the false news story question, which in a way isn't new with the election because it started at least as far back as climate change. But I think a lot of this has to do with elites and experts getting conflated and the total hatred of elites swallowed up hatred of experts too. And so facts are no longer something that we need to worry about, which is why Donald was able to lie without any consequence whatsoever. And it's also why, since he lives that, it's why he's having conversations with foreign leaders without bothering to get the briefing books from state. It's terrifying. So my question is, what about the basic problem of facts just not being valued anymore? Question about anymore, I mean, without setting cynical, because I'm really not setting, several of my comments this evening have been cynical. But I mean, there's an old tradition of saying that facts don't matter in politics at all. Walter Lutman said that in the 1920s. Jupiter said it. There's a lot of reason to think they wouldn't matter in terms of the decision that you make in the voting booth that they wouldn't matter. So I'm not sure how much worse things are, but others should weigh in. I would agree with that. And I think the other thing about it is, I mean, facts are contested thing in the public realm, right? And data and what data is really telling us is people who are often at the, marginalized part of society, their life is about, I mean, they have to continue to contest the facts that are being put out by experts and others about what's real, what data is real, because their life speaks of different data, right? So I think it's not that it's different. I mean, it may be different for him that we have elected someone who's like that. But it's just that a whole bunch of people who don't believe the facts and stuff manage to actually elect someone. That's really, I think, the different part of it, the fact, I mean, the idea that, I mean, people don't trust what comes out of a lot of stuff, right? They don't trust it, and it's hard for them too, because they've been harmed by, you know, I mean, actually harmed by wrong data, wrong information, wrong research, so on and so forth. And the recovery from that is really hard, right? And so not to question in some sense, particularly if you're marginalized in society is a fool's game, right? So insurrectionism comes from mistrust, right? So you start trying to overthrow an institution because you see it failing you in one fashion or another. And if you look at where the insurrectionists were most powerful in this campaign, it was insurrectionism around government. Let's elect someone who genuinely doesn't know how the system works and is probably not gonna honor the way that it's worked in the past, and the media. The chant at Trump rallies was not just lock her up, it was CNN sucks. So this was a literal rejection of those institutions of media. It was also the experience of people making their own institutions to sort of put them in place. Steve Bannon is not the sort of person who would build a media empire 10 or 20 years ago. So I love, I mean, I love that Peter gives us the null hypothesis here. Maybe media has nothing to do with any of this. God, I hope not. But if we put the null hypothesis aside, we can sort of go and go, wow, this media is really, really different from what it used to be. I agree that facts as having a special purity and power because of their facts has always been wildly overrated. We live in a consensus reality. And the truth is we had pretty widespread consensus on what much of that fact pattern was. It was a fact pattern that excluded voices and excluded groups. Lots of people felt unrepresented by it. But you had enough people sort of saying, here's the basics of what's going on. The revolution we've had in media means that lots more people can produce the media. This in some ways is really good. You can start hearing voices that you weren't hearing before. But that consensus reality goes away. And one of the big ways it went away was when sort of the governors of that consensus reality stood up and said, yeah, neutrality, nah, get rid of it. This is where we're going. What that was for people who already mistrusted those institutions, it just blew it up. And so now we're at a point where whatever different sides are going to have to fight for what is their consensus view of reality. We are not going to have an undisputed fact pattern any time soon. And the sooner progressives get that and sort of start figuring out how the space works, the sooner we recover from this, we start moving forward. And then there's a question. That makes me feel any better. Oh, it wasn't that too. Yeah, I feel lousy, and I hope you do too. I'd like to question the idea that civic media is necessarily good. I think civic media is simply about civics, which itself isn't necessarily good. But my question for you guys is, isn't a problem really that your side lost? And can you design a media that makes sure that your side wins? I think we're returning to a much more competitive media market, much more like the history of this country, where most media had very tight margins, and most media was directly involved in politics, run by politicians. It was partisan media. And I think what we need is a new form of partisan media that wins. I think someone else. I'll just quickly respond to that. There's an essay in the book by David Karp, who he makes a really important distinction between political technologies and civic technologies. And he says that the parties, the two major parties, have been really good at developing like Nation Builder as an example. He uses Nation Builder as an example of one that crossed the line, one that started as a political technology, which is a zero-sum game, where there is a winner and there is a loser, to one like Nation Builder that tried to be a platform for either party to use for political purposes. And then it was highly criticized by both sides because of doing that. What he's saying is that there are these zero-sum technologies. And we call that political technology, and that's where things are going within the campaigning world. And civic technologies are quite different, more along the lines of the sort of communitarian values that we've been talking about here, I suppose. The idea that people are talking to each other, not against each other. So I think it's a really important distinction. So what you're saying is that all media should be unapologetically zero-sum, which is kind of where, in a way, where things are already going. And I think that's part of the prompt that we're all using here, I think, is that the overwhelming trend in media is to sort of abandon any thoughts of nothing bias. Well, if I could just say, because I'm active in local civics as well as national and I don't find that there's a big distinction between civics and politics, politics might be a subset of civics. Can you speak in the mic for the recording? Politics might be a subset of civics, but at a local level, you're engaged in politics and civics, so there's not a big distinction. So I don't know that everyone on. Well, I'll speak for myself. I strongly disagree with you on that. So for me, the definition of civics is vastly broader than politics. It includes campaigns that work to shape norms. It includes market forces that work to create certain changes. It includes technologies that make certain behaviors possible or less possible. We've created the term in part because we wanted to look at something much broader than explicitly political media. So I don't actually disagree with your diagnosis. I think we're there, basically. I think at this point, we have a highly partisan media with extremely tight margins, with people trying to figure out how to subdivide and subdivide and subdivide. I don't think it's particularly healthy. I think this sort of aggressive partisanship actually makes it very difficult to find common ground around something like a civic issue where we could say something along the lines of, can we all agree that we'd like to be more energy independent, for instance, less dependent on international alliances around this? Could you start building something around that? There's all sorts of possibilities of civics that sort of embrace technological change, market change, norms change around that, that don't inherently have to be political. So I think that's why I at least have tried to work pretty hard to pull those two away from one another. What I would say is that I think civic media that is independent from being political media is still in pretty early stages. And we're trying to figure out how that media gets built and how it sort of comes about. I think in some ways, one of the ways that we might look at the smoking wreckage of public discourse at the moment is to sort of say maybe that's actually where we want to make some bets because this discourse in which we sort of go, OK, our side lost. Let's fight harder is just something I'm having a really hard time getting psyched up about because that just doesn't seem to be working all that well. I'm not sure our side lost. I think Clinton lost. And I think that a lot of the work that one of the beautiful things that people were communicating afterwards and people have said it here is messages of care, of recognizing community across different lines and saying, how are you? And that those communities recognize each other and can sustain doesn't mean that those communities are in conversation with the communities that think they won. I mean, we all actually will get to enjoy fallout just in different degrees. So it's that William Gibson moment of future, unevenly distributed. So hell, unevenly distributed. So there's that to it that the tools that people are using. And social media is an obvious one because it's one that all of us can use and do use. Part of what I do with my research is look at, well, who are these groups who are self-organizing and literally building buildings and creating communities and trying to figure out, there's a group in Berlin, this bowel group in, and they bought a house together. And there are designers in it. The designers, they all collectively decided. One of the reasons they start to do this is a whole bunch of them are older gay men who didn't necessarily have families. And they didn't want to be old and alone. They're like, OK, community. And they had to negotiate with the city. And the city said, oh, you're solving problems for us. Yeah, we'll sell you this land for less. So people are trying to solve problems and not particularly involving government, certainly not big government, and strategically engaging local government in meaningful ways. Because these problems are persistent and we actually need to kind of move toward solutions. So the big thing around this political moment, I don't know. I mean, it's also my optic because I look at cities and not so much looking at the federal. The other thing that I want to bring up is this is more pointless use of a kind of, perhaps, one might call this a civic media tool. But it was Obama who, in his reelection, did this absolutely granular read of the country figuring out which place at 2 in the morning do I need to play an ad. So Trump, I can't say he went high because, well, we'll kill ourselves if we hear that quote again. But Trump took it very broad, Obama, with his lawyerly strategist way. He went super narrow. But they kind of reflect each other. Trump was a hero strategy, then. I'm sure you want to. Yeah, well, I'll go actually. And then we'll have time for one more question. Sorry. So I just wanted to make a plug for pluralism of ideas within movements or media properties or anything else that matters. Not necessarily meaning neutrality and not necessarily meaning representativeness of the whole country in a statistical sense, but pluralism because groups that aren't plural are stupid and also aren't effective at growing. So a quick contribution is in the chapter, where I say we need groups and organizations and media properties and technologies that have scale, that are big, that also, though, have depth that change people, that can show unity and that also encompass diversity, which I really meant pluralism of ideas and perspectives, which is actually an acronym, STUD. So I'm using it for the first time here. But so that would be, or you could say DUD. But I think STUD would be better. Anyway, that was meant as an answer to your question, because if what we had was just a strategy of trying to win, then we are abandoning the goal of having pluralism within. And I think that leads to a dumb decision. It just leads to narrowness of all kinds. Wow. Do you have a question? Go out one more question. Yeah, it feels like there's a theme where we're still struggling with porous borders between digital and analog and local and global, particularly around identity and agency. So in what ways do folks feel if only we had something about as effective as the license plate on my car to realize what we've long talked about on the internet, that I can act in an anonymous way or with an alias or be identified, and the extent to which that would lead to more trust and civil discourse. And I would say that we have a legacy in a lot of Anglo countries, including America, of being against a national ID which is translated into the digital world. We have some European and Asian examples where national ID cards have been designed to protect privacy and enable services, rather than using a social security number or something. But given that we have this going from being anonymous to being easily identified, even through big aggregate data, it feels like that makes it very hard to move to a new civic media. Cesar, I know you wanted to say something. Go ahead and take a first shot at that. No, I don't want to take a first shot at that. I don't want to take a first shot at that. I don't need to take a first shot at that. I wish I thought that verifiable real name identity would make us behave more civilly with one another. In many ways, that was the dream of Facebook, was that by having a close linkage between your digital self and your physical self, that people would treat each other better. I certainly know a lot of people who have gotten off of Facebook in the last week or so because getting yelled at by people you know and remember from high school or might have to face at the Thanksgiving dinner table is actually much harder than dealing with the anonymous attack. Beyond that, I will say we've talked almost exclusively about the US here. It's worth remembering that almost all these tools that we work on get used globally. And even if I thought that real name identity would help in the US, I'm really reluctant to institute that over the people of Ethiopia where the government is arresting thousands at a time based on their support, as loose as it may be for the Aroma Rights Movement, where they recently arrested 1,600 ring leaders. Well, I was suggesting for protected anonymous identity is as important as to authenticate. I was suggesting all three just don't have any real system. So we're pretty good at persistent pseudonymity, which has a lot of what's going for it. You would think a. Not with the vaccine analysis. So any single. So when we start getting into de-identification, you're going to have to go a long way to persuade me that a data set is de-identifiable. So even these national ID sets, there's a very, very good paper that came out of Sandy Pentland's lab over at MIT that suggests that with four pieces of data about a single coherent identity, you're probably going to be able to de-identify it. So I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your question. I heard you as arguing for persistence. If you're going to argue for really strong de-identifiability, that one's actually simpler, which is we just don't know how to do it. Yeah. Yeah. I was saying they're deep-full, but we haven't tackled agency and identity in the data set. I think, thank you for the question. I think we're going to wrap up. We were already five minutes over when we said we were going to wrap up. And so I want to take the opportunity to thank the panel for this incredible discussion. So if you could.